Friday, April 30, 2010

At the end of his 1843 book Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard writes that passion is "the genuinely human quality", and he adds that "the highest passion in a human being is faith". Today we are used to hearing people talk of their passions, whether they are "passionate about football", "passionate about music", or "passionate about retail". Such talk expresses enthusiasm, dedication, and often a thirst for success. It also indicates ways in which we find meaning and value in our lives. But what might it mean to regard passion is the most essential feature of the human being? What does Kierkegaard mean by passion?
In order to answer these questions, we need to look back at the philosophical tradition that Kierkegaard inherited. The dominant view within this tradition, from Plato and Aristotle through to Descartes, Spinoza and Kant, is that reason is the most important aspect of the human being. Philosophers have frequently opposed our capacity for rational thought to "the passions", or the emotions, and many have argued that living a good human life involves controlling, subduing, or even eliminating one's emotions and appetites. According to this view, reason ought to rule over the passions.
We can also trace through the history of philosophy a counter-movement which reverses this relationship between passion and reason. Kierkegaard might be located within this movement, alongside David Hume and the Romantic poets. When he emphasises passion, Kierkegaard challenges the idea that rational thought could or should encompass and direct human existence.
However, for Kierkegaard "passion" does not just signify emotion. More importantly, passion is a kind of desire. Again, this is an idea that Kierkegaard takes from the philosophical tradition. In his dialogue The Symposium, Plato dramatises a dinner-party at which the intellectual and cultural elite of Athens take turns to speak about the nature of Eros, which means desire or love. Socrates, the guest of honour, suggests that Eros is characterised by the absence of the desired object: one desires what one does not possess. Even when a lover seems to possess her beloved, she desires to continue to possess it in the future, which is not yet secure. . . .
Read the rest here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/apr/05/kierkegaard-philosophy-passion.

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WHAT IS 'THEORY'?

Institutionalised philosophy has before it something called 'philosophy,' which is emphatically not philosophy, that does not follow the protocols of that discipline, that does not measure up to apparently transparent standards of logical rigour and clarity. . . . This institutionalised 'philosophy,' which is not itself, produces another paradox as well: it proliferates a second philosophy outside the boundary that philosophy itself has set, and so it seems that philosophy has unwittingly produced this spectral double of itself. It may be that what is practised as philosophy in most of the language and literature departments . . . has come to constitute the meaning of 'philosophy,' and so the discipline of philosophy must find itself strangely expropriated by a double. And the more it seeks to dissociate itself from this redoubled notion of itself, the more effective it is in securing the dominance of this other philosophy outside the boundary that was meant to contain it. (Judith Butler, "Can the 'Other' of Philosophy Speak?" 241)

I shall use the word ‘theorist’ rather than ‘philosopher’ because the etymology of ‘theory’ gives me the connotation I want, and avoids some I do not want. The people I shall be discussing do not think that there is something called ‘wisdom’ in any sense of the term which Plato would have recognised. So the term ‘lover of wisdom’ seems inappropriate. But theoria suggests taking a view of a large stretch of territory from a considerable distance, and this is just what the people I shall be discussing do. They all specialise in standing back from, and taking a large view of, what Heidegger called the ‘tradition of Western metaphysics’ – what I have been calling the ‘Plato-Kant canon.’ (Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity 96)

Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me. (Sigmund Freud)

A man with one theory is lost. He needs several of them, or lots! He should stuff them in his pockets like newspapers. (Bertolt Brecht)

Something is happening to the way we think about the way we think. (Clifford Gertz, "Blurred Genres: the Refiguration of Social Thought" 20)

The history of thought is the history of its models. (Frederic Jameson, The Prison-House of Language)